The NCAA News - News & Features

Homophobia now out in the open as an issue for discussion

BY RONALD D. MOTT
Staff Writer

For about as long as women have competed in intercollegiate athletics, people have spoken quietly about homosexuality.

Candid discussion of the topic has been nearly nonexistent at national forums and conventions, at least until recently. During its annual meeting in conjunction with the NCAA Women's Final Four in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Women's Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) packed a hotel ballroom for a panel discussion that asked one question regarding homophobia: "Are you putting your head in the sand?"

Homophobia, many contend, is just another tool for discrimination, a way to oppress people and impede their growth.

In college athletics, those people say, homophobia causes coaches to be blackballed from consideration for certain jobs or promotions. It causes negative recruiting as prospective student-athletes and their parents are advised to avoid specific institutions because of a homosexual coach or players. Some say homophobia may even cause sexual promiscuity, as female student-athletes attempt to shed the gay-athlete label.

Charged, emotional issues such as homosexuality frequently prompt debate that stalls on the question of whether it is right or wrong. Deciding one way or the other, however, does not make the issue go away.

Based on the attendance at the WBCA event and the passion with which many participants voiced their opinions, it is clear that homophobia is a serious concern for all of college athletics. It is a particularly significant issue as it relates to women's sports.

"I think in many respects, those of us in the profession have been putting our heads in the sand when it comes to the topic of homophobia," said Linda Hill-MacDonald, women's basketball coach at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and WBCA president. "It certainly is a real issue, one that no longer can or should be avoided. When sensitive issues are avoided, it creates more fears and more opportunities to use such a thing against people."

"It shouldn't matter," said Dee Todd, assistant commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference and president of the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators. "I just can't imagine discriminating against someone because of their sexuality, and I know what it is like to be discriminated against, being both female and an ethnic minority in the field of athletics."

Pat Griffin, a former swimming coach and a professor of social justice education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has not just talked about the issue of homosexuality and homophobia; she has made a career of meeting the issue head-on.

Griffin dives into the subject daily. She served as a panelist at the WBCA forum, and often speaks before college and university groups about the topic. In addition, she wrote the curriculum that accompanies a videotape produced last year on homophobia in women's athletics.

"My perspective always is that it is an issue of discrimination," Griffin said. "Lesbians are being discriminated against in sports. That discrimination doesn't just affect lesbians. It affects all women in sports, because women are afraid of being associated with the lesbian label because of all of the stereotypes. Women lose their jobs, they're not hired for jobs, athletes are dismissed from teams, coaches use negative recruiting. All of this stuff is going on. And the silence...."

Fear, or homophobia, fills the void left by that silence, Griffin says.

The first label

At some point in childhood, most young girls who actively participate in athletics are called -- often affectionately -- "tomboys." The term has endured from the baseball diamonds of the 1950s to the urban basketball courts of the mid-1990s. In many respects, "tomboy" is the first label that challenges the propriety of a female presence in competitive athletics.

Cozette Brewer, assistant executive director of the WBCA and a former basketball player at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, remembers the days when she was dubbed a tomboy. She still does not understand the stigma.

"Why can't they just be athletic young girls?" said Brewer. "Why do they have to be called tomboys?"

The traditional answer is that athletics long has been seen in America as an activity for males. Females attracted to athletics, the theory goes, must harbor male-like characteristics.

"It's only been recently that this arena has opened up to females," Hill-MacDonald said. "In some regards, that can be very threatening when opportunities become available to women, and those who have been in control and in power for years and years and years suddenly see the possibility of some of that power being usurped.

"I think homophobia, sexual preference, with regard to women is used as a way of control," she said. "That is very unfortunate. The male image in athletics is macho. Men are not going to break that down. It's just not going to happen. They are going to retain that image at all costs.

"That does not mean that there aren't athletes who happen to be gay playing men's sports, but nobody is going to talk about it because that would destroy the image. But to talk about it in regards to women, it helps keep us in our place."

Sandra L. Vivas, executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA), said the labels attached to women who hold professional positions in athletics are as strong as they are for athletes.

She said some athletics directors screen applicants for coaching positions and administrative jobs based on perceived sexual orientation. Vivas said some athletics directors simply hire women who have husbands or hire male coaches to avoid dealing with the lesbian label for women's teams.

"The rumors are going around like, 'Well, so and so lost a coach and the first thing they're going to do is hire a married wo-
man,' " Vivas said. "It's the No. 1 thing I'm now hearing -- that people who have the best opportunity to get jobs are going to be married women. That comes up constantly. It is a way to always keep women looking over their shoulders to make sure that everything they do is right and proper and is what society wants them to do."

W. James Copeland, athletics director at Southern Methodist University and president of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics, said he is surprised that anybody would involve questions of sexuality in the hiring process.

"That's a question that I have never asked," Copeland said about inquiring about a female job applicant's sexual orientation. "I am surprised that there is a sense there is that overt questioning, especially at state universities, where legally you would be in trouble if you ask that kind of question. I think when it comes to the hiring process, we're bound by personnel procedures that are asexual. That's how we have to approach it."

Negative recruiting

Much of the concern about homosexuality in the women's coaching profession stems from the belief that a coach's lifestyle will influence her players.

The case of Pam Parsons, a former women's basketball coach at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, might be the most familiar example.

Parsons admitted having an intimate relationship with one of her athletes, Tina Buck, that began with Buck's recruitment to the team and continues today. After Sports Illustrated chronicled the story of Parsons and Buck in a February 1982 issue, homosexuality in women's athletics -- particularly basketball -- became visible and came to be used more as a recruiting tool against lesbians in the game. Coaches, recruits and recruits' parents began speaking more freely of their concerns about homosexuality in certain programs.

Today, recruits and their parents may be as likely to ask a recruiter about the issue of homosexuality as about the strength of an institution's degree program or the playing time that a recruit can expect to see. Some believe that female recruits are not offered scholarships at certain schools because of their sexual orientation.

Cheryl Littlejohn, an assistant women's basketball coach at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, served on the WBCA panel and shared her position that homosexuality contradicts the teachings of the Bible. She does not approve of homosexuality as a lifestyle.

Littlejohn said her responsibility when recruiting is to be as open and upfront with recruits and their parents as possible. Still, she doesn't believe it is appropriate for recruiters to discuss the homosexuality of other coaches and programs in order to discourage recruits from considering those institutions.

"I'm a Christian and I don't think I'm any better than anyone else," she said.

Littlejohn recalled a student-athlete she was recruiting who had only one question after Littlejohn made her positive pitch about her program: Are there lesbians on your team?

"There is a lot of negative recruiting," Littlejohn said. "Inform those kids about the truth. We are not running the show. They are. The kids can discriminate. It's their life. That's their choice."

Hill-MacDonald added, "There are coaches, because of their homophobia, who will not recruit a young woman if they knew she was struggling (with her sexuality). I know of people who say they will not have gay athletes in their program. They probably have had them, but they don't know about it. That's what we need to break through.... I would hope that, somewhere down the road, they realize that people are people and an athlete is an athlete, and that sexual preference (should have) nothing to do with whether a young woman receives an athletics scholarship."

Griffin says negative recruiting can impact even the most successful of women's programs, like Pat Summitt's at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

"The coach there took a pretty strong nondiscriminatory stance," Griffin said. "Her program got labeled as a lesbian program, and then parents and athletes were afraid to be associated with it.

"There is a lot of fear about having your program tainted with this lesbian label. Again, the solution is we need a lot more education about this. We need more coaches standing up against discrimination so that the ones who do aren't left hanging out there while everyone else is being quiet about their beliefs or exploiting people's prejudices."

As for fears that lesbian coaches flirt with their players, some respond that the athletics community should be at least as concerned about male coaches who become involved in romances with student-athletes.

"What never is an issue is if the male coach sleeps with the female athlete," said Jacquie Joseph, women's softball coach at Michigan State University and president of the National Softball Coaches Association. "It's accepted. If a female coach sleeps with a female player, fire her tomorrow. She has no integrity. If a male coach sleeps with a female player, fire him tomorrow. He has no integrity. They're both horribly wrong. But the male coach isn't being fired. He's just being slapped on the hands."

Homosexuality all around

Joseph also says the stereotype that women's athletics attracts proportionately more homosexuals than men's athletics is inaccurate. She believes softball has had to counter such negative stereotyping more than many other women's sports. Joseph says that about 10 percent of all Americans are homosexuals and that percentage applies equally to all sports -- women's and men's.

"People like to make an issue about softball," she said. "Homosexuality is one in 10. It's one in 10 on the football team. It's one in 10 on the baseball team. It's one in 10 on the softball team. It's one in 10 on the basketball team. Those are facts.

"People try to make it an issue in softball because of players' appearance. Look at our uniforms. We have to wear a male uniform. That's just the way it is.

"The fact is that it's one in 10, but we want to make it an issue on the women's side. I'm here to tell you that it's one in 10 on the football team. If there are 100 guys on the football team, 10 of them are closet homosexuals. Period."

Joseph said she is most concerned that the stigma may force many female student-athletes into sexual relationships as a way to prove they are heterosexual. She said the label even causes some athletes to dress uncomfortably or doctor their physical appearances to look more feminine -- all in an effort to eliminate any doubts about their sexuality.

"Many years ago the line was, 'If you loved me, you'd do it,' " Joseph said. "Today it's, 'If you don't do it, you must be gay.' That has been a very destructive thing in forcing the high-school and college female into becoming intimate before they're ready and for the wrong reason. You've got a group of athletes out there who are trying to prove their sexuality long before they're really ready.

"What's most unfair is that it would be nice if they could just compete and be able to deal with that and not have to be dealing with this. It's so absurd that these kids have got that at the back of their minds the whole way through. How else can you explain the sheer numbers of females going to 'make-up,' having to dress up to compete? Guys don't have to do that. It's added pressure that you wish they didn't have to deal with."

Debbie Brown, women's volleyball coach at the University of Notre Dame and president of the AVCA, agrees with Joseph that women's sports do not attract more homosexuals than men's sports.

"I don't believe the statement that homosexuality runs rampant (in women's athletics) is truthful," she said. "Obviously, there is homosexuality in women's athletics as there is in men's athletics, so I take exception to the statement that it runs rampant."

"Of course there are gay men in athletics," Griffin said. "Why aren't we as upset or concerned about that? Part of the answer is that sport is so consistent with what it is to be a man in this culture, and because of our stereotypes that gay men don't fit into that.

"I think people can't even imagine that the quarterback could be gay. It doesn't fit. It's such an oxymoron -- gay quarterback.... Gay men who are interested in sport either get driven out or they are so completely and deeply closeted that they never would bring it up."

Future strategies

What does the future hold for addressing homophobia in women's athletics?

As with many social issues, continuing discussion of homosexuality in college athletics likely will help bridge gaps between varying philosophies. But bridging those gaps will take time; some say it will take a long time.

Others say achieving understanding and respect for differences in sexual preference might better be achieved in smaller circles -- such as a campus community -- than in a national debate.

"There doesn't seem to be a groundswell (for a national debate)," Copeland said. "I think it is being addressed on campuses. Beyond that, I really don't see a groundswell of people saying this is something we need to resolve, as there was with gender equity, for instance."

Hill-MacDonald credits institutions with doing a better job of educating faculty, staff and student-athletes about homosexuality than they were several years ago. She cautions, however, that much more can and should be done.

"There are many institutions taking steps to provide educational opportunities for faculty, coaching staffs, student bodies, as well as athletics departments," she said. "That's good. That's positive. I hope those kinds of efforts continue. Ignorance is something that cannot be excused.

"We want to get beyond the point that this is an issue and get to where it is just another thing we deal with in the realm of coaching. When we get to that point, then we have arrived. Maybe that's a long time off; maybe that's wishful thinking."

Todd suggests the key may be diversity training workshops, like the one sponsored by the NCAA, and efforts such as the NCAA Life Skills Program, which will add a diversity component to its curriculum that addresses sexual orientation.

"When people hear 'diversity workshops,' they think in terms of black and white," Todd said. "There's much more to diversity than black and white. It is about how you react to people who are different from yourself. Until we learn how to deal with our personal feelings, we're not going to go anywhere."

"There's got to be room in sports for everybody," Griffin said. "There's no reason why we can't work this out. There are teams that have. There are teams where there are gay and straight players and coaches playing together and everybody is having a wonderful sport experience. Unfortunately, they're probably in the minority."